The Five Protective Factors

Parental Resilience - Parents maintain a positive attitude and have the ability to cope with, creatively solve, and bounce back from all types of life challenges.

Social Connections - Parents have a network of people, agencies, and organizations that provide emotional support and concrete assistance.

Knowledge of Parenting and Child Development - Parents understand what to expect at different stages of child development, effective parenting skills, and ways of finding help with specific developmental or behavioral problems.

Concrete Support in Times of Need - Parents have access to formal and informal services and support from social networks in times of family crisis.

Children’s Social and Emotional Competence - Parents work with children to help them learn to interact positively with others, communicate their emotions, and feel good about themselves. 
The Center for the Study of Social Policy reports that this breakthrough strategy for dealing with child abuse and neglect shows great promise because:

• The Protective Factors have been demonstrated to work and are informed by extensive, rigorous research.
• Activities that build the Protective Factors can be built into programs and systems that already exist in every state, such as early childhood education and child welfare, at little cost.
• Strengthening Families has widespread support from social science researchers, state child welfare officials, early childhood practitioners, and policy experts. Currently, the Strengthening Families approach is being applied in 36 states.
• Early childhood educators want to strengthen families: a National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) survey shows that 97% want to do more to prevent maltreatment.